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Friday, June 28, 2013

Journal of An Awkward Academic or Music in the State of War

Ainehi Edoro

Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism
Day 1: At up-scale academic conference in fancy
Johannesburg uni.

Everywhere is swarming with rock-star
professors and genius graduate students well on their way to becoming rock-star
professors at some future time. It's a funny sensation feeling like a fish out
of water.

Units of coffee consumed: 10 (went out late
last night drinking, to wait out jet lag).

Units of alcohol: 10 (to counteract caffeine
jitters).

Source: PrinceClauseFund.org

Number of times raised hand to make a smart
comment/question for the sole purpose of impressing my fellow participants : 5

Number of times succeeded in making actual
smart comment/question : 0

Number of times star-struck at meeting rock
stars...of the academic kind I mean:6

Number of times tried but failed woefully at
schmoozing with said rock stars: 6

May or may not have spilled a glass of water
during a lecture in full view of horrified academics pretending that I did not
just make an arse of myself.

May or may not have spilled a cup of coffee on
someone an hour later. Again in full view of the whole room. And again received
the horrified-but-pretending-you-did-not-just-make-and-arse-of-yourself look
from fellow academics.

General assessment of first day at up-scale
academic conference: not horribly bad seeing I actually feel quite up to the
task of making a "detailed" journal entry of what actually took
place.

10:30 Listened to Arjun Appadurai give a lecture on finance capital
and derivatives. Said something about contemporary form of capitalism not being
about commodities or surplus value but all about debt, derivatives, and taking
risks on risk. One hour of illuminating but hard, dense intellectual food. Chewy
and slow to process.

2:15 Back from lunch. Was
hanging out in the lobby area talking with…can’t remember whom…when I heard
music playing in the conference room. Sounded like a mix of electronic funk and
maybe a touch of Afrobeat.

2: 16 Hurried off to investigate.
Projector screen up. DJ mixers stacked in a corner. Room suddenly seemed
lively. Less bare and academicky. Ntone Edjabe was in the room chatting
with Achille Mbembe and leafing through a stack of vinyl heaped on the table.
Is he not the guy who founded Chimurenga? Shaggy-afro-headed, he is
wearing a hat and a funky Ankara print windbreaker. Dressed for the part. The
real postcolonial hustler!

Projected on a screen are past covers
of Chimurenga. They are stunning, gritty, raw. I was struck by this
one cover that had a group of three soldiers pursuing an Indian woman dressed
in sari. She’s pretty, sexy, holding a gun, and on the run. To the right of the
image is written: “Authority Stealing,” title of a Fela song. Fusing different
cultural references and images to create something that is both urban and
vintage, that brings together music, writing, and art is typical of Chimurenga, a hip, pan-African magazine
where Africans write for Africans. Reminds me of Drum from
back in the day. Trying not to seem to delighted that instead of another
one-hour "illuminating" academic lecture, we are about to listen to a
DJ and a philosopher have a conversation about music and politics.

2:35 Ntone leans back against
his chair. He is relaxed and ready to play. Achille a bit less so, but he’s
smiling and saying something to Ntone in French. The music has not been
completely turned off. It’s playing in the background as Achille begins the
conversation.

2:40 Achille: “You were born in
Douala. You lived in Lagos. How is that you’ve chosen, of all places, to settle
down in Cape Town?”

Pause.

2:41 Ntone: “Let me begin my response
with music.”

Response is definitely odd in an
academic setting where silences are awkward, where speech is the primary way of
responding to an address. We all looked on, unsure, curious, expectant. A
Soukous track comes on. Intoxicating in the way only Soukous can be. Despite
Ntone’s invitation, no one danced. Music, he explains, is supposed to the
danced to. A few participants swayed this way and that, but no one really
danced. I wanted to dance. I wanted to dance so badly, but didn’t. No one
dances at academic conferences. It’s just not done, like making out during a
church service. In an academic conference you put words in display and not
bodies. Honestly, it would have been weird if anyone had danced. Still, I
couldn’t help feeling like a moment, charged with possibility, had been lost,
in our refusal to take the risk of placing our bodies on display to our fellow
scholars.

2:45 - 4:00 Going back and
forth between the seriousness of academic discourse and the playfulness of the
DJ booth, responding to questions first with music and only later with words,
playing music long enough to make us shifty on are seats. I say it's all play
on form, play perhaps on the form of the academic conference.

As Ntone told us about his journey
from Doula to Cape Town and the founding of Chimurenga, I was
struck by how often Fela kept coming up.

Ntone: “I never experienced Fela as a
musician only but also as a radical thinker, a revolutionary. He confronted
power whether it came in the form of military dictators like Babangida, religious
leaders, Abiola, Thatcher, Botha. In Cameroun, I was used to musicians and poets
resisting power but it was done indirectly by not naming things or giving
things a new name. But Fela named things, named the enemy, named power.”

Fela expanded the language of
resistance, made it so that the language and form of music could absorb the
pressures of the political. As Ntone puts it elsewhere, "By breaking the
divide between the public and the private [Fela] expanded our vocabulary of resistance
– the musician was no longer simply an entertainer."

At one point, recalling the famous
Fela quote, “Music is the weapon,” Achille says to Ntone, “If music is the
weapon, who is the enemy?”

Even I knew that was a genius question.
Ntone ended up not addressing the question but, I found this scribbled down in
my notebook:

What does it mean to
think of music as an instrument of war, as a force of survival in the midst of
war, as force of struggle against war, as something that destroys, that
implicates one in a state of war? War is threat to the life of the city. It
interrupts that constellation of forces that make up the urban space. Perhaps
music is the means through which the urban is perserved, survives, persists in
the midst of crisis. Music is a way of introducing form/performance into
the chaos that is war. Music names the enemies, placing them in an exposed and
precarious position. Both in music and in war, life and the body are the
central object of concern. In war, life is exposed to danger. Death is rife.
Where war harms and mutilate the body, music is a state in which the body
discovers its capacity for life, movement, and form.

Ainehi Edoro studies African and contemporary British novels at Duke University. She also blogs about African fiction at Brittle Paper.

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The Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism is an independent platform for critical social analysis based at the University of the Witwatersrand. It is intended for intellectual stimulation, exchange and sustained interaction around the work of noted scholars in the humanities and social sciences, and the emerging fields of critical legal and science studies.